What makes a good - or a struggling - World Language reader?
Understanding ourselves, and our students, as readers
“I knew a big percentage of my world language students didn’t like the reading. To be honest, I didn’t like it either”
“I don’t get it. This is stupid.”
Cole was visibly exasperated. And although I hid my frustration better than he did, I was pretty exasperated too. We had been working through a French paragraph for the better part of my lunch break. I had patiently worked through the passage with him, word by word, nodding encouragingly as Cole dutifully translated aloud. If he came to an unknown word, I helpfully pointed out the translations in the footnotes or, if the word wasn’t there, I told him so we could keep moving along. By the time we got to the end of the passage, I was confident I had taught him every single word.
But, he still couldn’t answer ANY of the comprehension questions. I didn’t know what else to do to help him.
Although Cole was the class member who was most vocal about his distaste for reading in French, I knew a big percentage of my students didn’t like the reading. To be honest, I didn’t like it either. I tried to pick interesting articles, and I always worked through them carefully ahead of time to provide a glossary of difficult words. But, whenever I taught reading I was left with nagging questions:
Do the students understand? How can I really evaluate their comprehension?
Translating every word is like a chore; how can I make it more engaging?
How do I keep kids from using translators?
How do I address all the new vocabulary students will encounter while they’re reading?
These questions bothered me for many years, until my sister (a reading specialist and brilliant teacher herself!) shared some professional resources with me. My three favorites, books which have transformed my own thinking about literacy instruction, are:
When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do by Kylene Beers
Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Content Comprehension in Grades 6-12 by Cris Tovani
The Book Whisperer by Donnalyn Miller,
While none of these resources specifically address the special challenges of reading in a second language, they helped me understand why my current approach - of painstakingly working through each vocabulary word and then asking comprehension questions was ineffective (and even counterproductive). I’ve spent the subsequent decade applying my learning to more effectively share the joy of reading with my French and Spanish students.
In this four-part blog post, I’ll share
Part 1 - understanding why some students are bad readers
Part 2 - infusing lots of short texts throughout your instruction
Part 3 - techniques for introducing vocabulary
Part 4 - techniques for supporting students in reading longer texts
My thinking is heavily influenced by the three authors listed above, and I’ve included links and citations where I modified ideas directly from their work.
Getting started: Understanding myself as a Reader
To better understand how to teach reading, it helps to look at our own reading habits. Almost every language teacher is a good reader, which is part of why we become teachers in the first place.
Take 2 minutes to look at this unclear text and figure out what is going on.
He put down $20 at the window. The woman behind the window gave $6. The person next to him gave $7, but he gave it back to her. So when they went inside, she bought him a large bag of popcorn. Beers, 2003
When I look at this passage, I start asking questions:
Where are these people? (I see they made a purchase at a window and they bought popcorn. So I think maybe they’re at a movie. But - it could be somewhere else, like the circus, a sporting event, or…?)
How many people are there? (There are three: a vendor who is a woman, and a man who buys a ticket (?) for himself and a female companion. Maybe they’re on a date, but it could be a parent & adult child, friends, or…?)
What’s going on? (I constructed a narrative for this paragraph in my mind: a man takes his date to the movies and buys tickets for them both. The woman offers to pay for her ticket, but he refuses to accept the payment, so she buys popcorn for them to share. I might be wrong, but that’s what could be happening.)
How did you approach this passage? Did you start at the first word and read to the end? I didn’t! As a good reader, the first thing I did was, partway through, realize I had lost the thread (I actually said to myself, “Wait…what?”). At this point I went back and reread the passage.
Rereading is the first and most important strategy good readers use. We do it so naturally, we don’t even recognize it as a strategy.
Many of our students, on the other hand, NEVER re-read. More about this later.
What other strategies did you use to make sense of the difficult passage? Some things I did were:
Reread
Work back and forth through the text
Figure out the pronouns & antecedents
Use known information to make connections (the money, the window, the popcorn)
Skip / come back to unknown information
Fill in details from my own knowledge to create a narrative
“Good readers don’t magically ‘get it’ - they construct meaning through a process of applying strategies, making guesses, and embracing ambiguity”
I used all of these strategies without even really realizing it. As a good reader, I monitor my own comprehension and am aware of when I lose the thread of meaning in a passage. When this happens, I don’t throw up my hands in defeat; I apply one or more of the many tools in my reading strategies toolbox. This is consistent with research; according to a 2020 study, “successful learners are ready to learn, are aware of their own goals, monitor their learning process, apply their knowledge and skills, select their learning strategy according to the learning task and are motivated” (Habok, et al.) For me, reading is a process in which I continually ask myself questions, create and test hypotheses, and accept ambiguity as I work to construct meaning. I am comfortable with all of this, and even enjoy it!
Not so with many of our students!
By the time a student is in 3rd grade, they have self-identified as either ‘a reader’ or ‘not a reader’. This means by the time students get to our secondary language classes, they have spent many years developing their identity and strategies as readers… or not. A good rule of thumb is that the grade level you teach is the number of different reading levels present in your classroom. In other words, if you teach secondary world language, you ARE a reading instructor.
“If I can give a student the gift of literacy - even if they quit studying language after one semester - what a tremendous impact I can have on their life!”
Kids who are poor readers may read from the first word of the passage to the end, say “I don’t get it”, and give up on the process. What these students often don’t realize is that good readers don’t magically ‘get it’ - they construct meaning through a process of applying strategies, making guesses, and embracing ambiguity.
Ineffective readers can improve, and it is our job to show them how. The first step is to become aware of our own strategies when encountering a difficult passage. The second step is to explicitly teach kids these strategies though modeling and scaffolded practice, starting with the most basic strategy of all: We must explicitly teach kids to go back and re-read.
This is one of the biggest benefits of world language instruction! A student who comes to us after a decade of non-reading has the chance to reset. By going back to the very beginning of literacy instruction, we can give these students a second chance to master the reading strategies they missed the first time around. If I can open a student to literacy - even if they quit studying language after one semester - what a tremendous gift!
Thus, I encourage every world language teacher to develop their knowledge of emergent literacy, an area we can largely learn from our colleagues who teach primary school. Some percentage of our students’ futures depend on it.
To learn some concrete instructional strategies for the world language classroom, read part 2, part 3, and part 4 of this blog post.
Did you have an ‘aha’ moment that impacted your own understanding of reading comprehension? Share in the comments!
“Movie Theatre” inference passage quoted from Beers, Kylene. When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do. Bt Bound, 2003, pp 62-63
